News

Co-production forum marks 20th anniversary this year.

Laurynas Bareisa, winner of the 2021 best film prize at Venice’s Orrizonti section for his debut Pilgrims, is among the directors presenting new projects at the 20th edition of the Sofia Meetings co-production forum (22-26 March).

The Lithuanian director is bringing Drowning Dry to Sofia where it is one of five projects in a section dedicated to second feature films.

The section’s line-up also includes The Last Slap by Italian director Matteo Oleotto whose debut feature Zoran, My Nephew The Idiot premiered in Venice’s Critics Week in 2013.

The Last Slap’s...

The 11th edition of Arras Days (part of the The Arras Film Festival) is one more source for Euro projects still at the script phase to find some early coin support. Naturally there are some names here from some heavyweights including two filmmakers who were at the Venice Film Festival (Orizzonti section) in Teona Strugar Mitevska (The Happiest Man in the World) and Michal Blasko (Victim). We also have the creative tandem in Romanian scribe Alexandru Baciu and actress Maria Popistasu with a project that would become Baciu’s directorial fiction debut. Here are the projects vying for development grants.…...

Imanol Rayo’s “Dog Days,” a coming-of-age story set one sizzling summer in the Spanish countryside, won the top prize at the Thessaloniki Film Festival’s Crossroads Co-Production Forum, which wrapped with an award ceremony Wednesday night.

The Basque director’s fourth feature took home the Two Thirty-Five Co-Production Award, offering full post-production image and sound to a film that’s currently in development. Producer Iker Ganuza of Spanish production outfit Lamia was on hand to accept the prize from the jury, which praised the film as “a story about both emerging and buried passions, approached with a very personal touch of sensibility.”

Speaking to Variety ahead of the Thessaloniki industry event, Rayo described his “sensual summer story” as “a reflection on the way in which the intervention of the human being or ‘climate change’ modifies the landscapes, habits and lives of ordinary people.” The director’s debut feature, “Two Brothers,...

A humanitarian aid distribution center, a mild chaos of activity and people, all of them gathering up bags of food and supplies, loading them into SUVs, and heading off down mountain roads. It’s a public-facing show of altruism that gets laid down flat in Romanian filmmaker Radu Muntean’s latest, “Întregalde,” an incisive, mirthlessly amusing satire about the social contours of charity.

The camera briefly settles on Bucharest aid workers Cristina (Carmen Lopazan) and Radu (a quick cameo from director Muntean), and just as quickly abandons them after a scene-setting conversation about grateful aid recipients and the moral quicksand of loving one’s own virtuousness.

The story then follows three volunteers who split off from the other two: easily irritated Dan, pragmatic Ilinca and earnest Maria. Once inside Dan’s Land Rover, they’re free to gossip about Radu and Cristina and the vacation home they’re buying.

The three are headed for Întregalde,...

"Immaculately subtle and fiendishly clever." Grasshopper Film has revealed the first official US trailer for a Romanian film titled Întregalde, which premiered at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival last year. It played by in the Directors' Fortnight sidebar and picked up some great reviews at the fest, before hitting the Toronto, New York, and Vienna Film Festivals in the fall. A group on a humanitarian mission arrive in a remote area of Transylvania to offer the inhabitants various goods. Apart from a few quarrels and conflicts between the group members, everything seems to be going well for Maria and Dan. But soon after they stumble upon a disoriented local and try to help him, things go wrong... Starring Maria Popistasu, Ilona Brezoianu, Alex Bogdan, Luca Sabin, and Toma Cuzin. This is a strange trailer for the film, opening with the setup then jumping right into this scene where everything goes awry when the car gets stuck.

A lot gets lost in Radu Muntean’s fantastic “Întregalde.” Stuck in the mud as night falls in the thick of an increasingly sinister Romanian forest, people lose tempers, minds, control of their bowels, loyalties, ideals and maybe even a sense of themselves as decent, altruistic souls. But this uncannily gripping tragicomedy never loses your attention: Muntean, whose pedigree was established with 2010’s “Tuesday After Christmas,” but whose track record since has been more erratic than that of many of his Romanian New Wave peers, finds unexpectedly compelling new levels of scabrous humor and moving insight this time out. He is a filmmaker dynamically reborn amid the mulch and fallen leaves of the Transylvanian countryside, beside a stalled jeep that, like a Beckettian device, might be there but also might not.

In the back of the four-wheel-drive is Maria, who is riding with chatty, romantically frustrated Ilinca (Ilona Brezoianu) and quick-tempered,...

Other winners included P.S. Vinothraj’s ‘Pebbles’ and Martín de los Santos’s ’That Was Life’.

Russian director Philipp Yuryev was the big winner at this year’s Transilvania International Film Festival in Romania’s Cluj-Napoca, clinching the €10,000 Transilvania Trophy for his debut feature The Whaler Boy.

Distributed internationally by Laurent Danielou’s Paris-based Loco Films, the Russian-Polish-Belgian co-production also won the Director’s Award on its premiere at last year’s Venice Days.

It is the second Russian film in TIFF’s 20-year history to be presented with the top award: Ilya Krzhanovsky’s 4 shared the trophy with Juan Pablo Rebella...

There are some villages in Romanian Transylvania so remote from civilisation where not even Santa Claus dares enter; for many of them, small help comes in some unfashionable bags filled with cans and chips, not quite a dream for winter, yet something to eat for the Christmas table.

Radu Muntean’s new film, muddy road-movie Intregalde, is both about the deliverers, a sum of 30+ Bucharest-bred middle class philanthropists, arriving in jeeps clashing with the population of these villages, humble, poor yet open handed. Three of the adventurers are the protagonists: Maria (Maria Popistasu), Dan (Alex Bogdan) and Ilinca (Ilona Brezoianu), a superbly humorous, hysterical trio. While initially going in the other car with Radu (played by Muntean himself) and his family, Maria moves back with Dan and Ilinca out of boredom.

This change up, due to apparent lack of adventure,...

A trailer for Romanian director Radu Muntean’s eighth film and the fourth to be selected for Cannes has dropped ahead of its screening at this year’s Directors’ Fortnight.

“Întregalde,” the first acquisition of Romanian distribution company Voodoo Films’ sales arm, is a tense and mud-splattered affair that explores the true nature of altruism.

The film follows a trio of Millennials on their end-of-year mission to deliver parcels to a series of remote villages in rural Transylvania: there’s earnest Maria (Maria Popistasu), sociable Ilinca (Ilona Brezoianu) and SUV petrolhead Dan (Alex Bogdan).

The tone is set early on in an argument between a volunteer couple that Maria gets a lift with: Radu (the director in a cameo role) and Cristina (Carmen Lopazan), who chastises her boyfriend for feeling pleased with himself that an eight-year-old girl that he handed a tablet to remembered him from an earlier mission. She...

★★★★☆ Romanian director Radu Muntean's intensely observed domestic drama Tuesday, After Christmas (2010) is about the end of a marriage and the start of an affair. Paul (Mimi Branescu), a well-off, middle-class Romanian living in Bucharest has to make a choice between the two women he loves. Happily married to Adriana (Mirela Oprisor), Paul has also fallen for a younger woman Raluca (Maria Popistasu), his daughter's orthodontist.

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Tuesday, After Christmas

Directed by Radu Muntean

Romania, 2010

Patient, affecting, and rewarding, Tuesday, After Christmas, is easily identifiable as an entrant into the Romanian New Wave.

Paul (Mimi Branescu) is in love with two women, his wife Adriana (Mirela Oprisor), also the mother of his daughter, and Raluca (Maria Popistasu), their younger, more attractive dentist. With Christmas rapidly approaching, Paul’s infidelity becomes more difficult to bear, to the extent that he must decide between the two.

This is kind of like Scenes from a Marriage were it to be crosscut with an unmade sequel Scenes from an Affair. Shot like most of the major films coming out of current Romania, Tuesday, After Christmas is high-key, with real-time scenes, and ordinary locations. Dealing with social situations but in a less gruesome, urgent manner than its peer 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days, Muntean’s film cuts infrequently. There is no coverage within a scene to speak of,...

Each week within this column we strive to pair the latest in theatrical releases to worthwhile titles currently available on Netflix Instant Watch. But this week, we’re taking a break from our regular format to wrap up our Year-End 2011 coverage by offering the very Best of 2011′s Now Streaming releases, as determined by the Tfs Staff.

Kicking off our Best of 2011 picks is Tfs President & Managing Editor Dan Mecca, who braved theaters this year for better or worse to review such big releases as Jack and Jill, Fright Night and Captain America, has filled his Top 10 list with daring debuts, spectacular sophomore efforts, and stunning masterworks from some of cinema’s most celebrated auteurs. His picks here are alternately quirky and insightful.

Ceremony (2010) An Honorable Mention on Dan’s list, Max Winkler’s offbeat comedy also earned a spot on our Top 10 Directorial Debuts for, “Operating with a level...

"Romanian films set in the era after the fall of Communism suggest the nation suffers a hell of a hangover from the ideology," writes Steve Erickson in Gay City News. "For instance, Corneliu Porumboiu's Police, Adjective attacks draconian drug laws left over from the old regime. Tuesday, After Christmas presents a very different vision of Romania. Its characters can afford to buy expensive Christmas gifts; one of them picks up a 3,300 Euro telescope. It may not be entirely accurate to call the film apolitical, but the most political thing about it is its avoidance of Eastern European miserabilism and its depiction of people who could be living much the same lifestyles in Western Europe."

Damon Smith introduces an interview with director Radu Muntean for Filmmaker: "Tuesday, After Christmas, which premiered at Cannes last year, opens on a dreamy scene: sunlight bathes a naked couple, middle-aged Paul (Mimi Branescu) and pretty,...

The following is a reprint of our review from the New York Film Festival in 2010. For those wondering when the absurdly consistent Romanians would falter, well, consider their first middling effort to be Radu Muntean's "Tuesday, After Christmas." Paul (Mimi Branescu) is having a joyful affair with his daughter's orthodontist, Raluca (Maria Popistasu), whom he plans to leave his wife for. Before she departs the city of Bucharest for the holidays, she tells him the next time they see each other will be — you guessed it — the Tuesday after Christmas. Now, without an escape from real life's…...

Too often in the movies, affairs are either blithely romanticized in the grand European tradition of middlebrow “passion” films (The French Lieutenant’s Woman comes to mind) or used as a teaching tool to bludgeon audiences into accepting a damning moral perspective on the consequences of extramarital activity. (See Little Children, for instance.) Life has its own current, though, and the nature of relationships sometimes follows a pattern that is chaotic and irrational, messy and perturbing, where the boundaries between love and naked contempt (ah, Godard!) are no longer discernible. Movies from Voyage to Italy all the way down to Maren Ade’s Everyone Else have portrayed intra-relationship dynamics with emotional honesty and astute insight, leaving us with memorable impressions of love in a state of deterioration, or foundering on the shoals of time. In his fourth feature film, Romanian filmmaker Radu Muntean (Boogie, The Paper Will Be Blue) again...

by Vadim Rizov

Radu Muntean's Tuesday, After Christmas is the director's fourth feature, the first to see theatrical release (scheduled for the indefinite future) and the fifth sample of the Romanian New Wave that'll have a chance to be seen by more Americans than just 300 New Yorkers. (This list includes The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, 4 Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days, 12:08 East of Bucharest and Police, Adjective.) Fairly or not, they form a coherent portrait of Romanian society, despite their directors' varying formal agendas. In them, Romania is a land of fluorescent lighting and charmless Soviet‐bloc architecture, populated by the drunk and dispossessed, the obese and weary, built on top of a collapsing infrastructure combining bureaucratic officiousness with minimal health care, where everyone is rude to everyone else for no good reason at all.

As it happens, there's a late‐breaking shout‐out to 12:08 East of Bucharest in Tuesday,...

Filed under: Reviews, Cinematical, Festivals

Tuesday, After Christmas:

There have been one or two movies about infidelity before (maybe three), and while you may have naturally assumed that 'Obsession' was the ultimate cinematic comment on the subject, Radu Muntean's 'Tuesday, After Christmas' is perhaps the most vital "boy cheats girl" tale since Bergman's 'Scenes From a Marriage.' A clean and unyielding portrait of the Bucharest bourgeoise, Muntean's film wastes little time in transcending its familiar milieu. Its first shot - one of those miraculous long-takes that have become a staple of recent Romanian cinema - is immediately arresting as it observes Cristi (Dragos Bucur) and Raluca (Maria Popistasu) sharing a relaxed and engaging post-coital conversation in the nude. Raluca isn't Cristi's wife, she's his daughter's dentist, and while the various relationships aren't made explicitly clear until the next scene, the instability of their affair is clear from their affectionate but wary conversation.

Minutes and movement don’t matter in Radu Muntean’s opening scene for the Romanian drama Marti, dupa craciun/Tuesday, After Christmas which played at the New York Film Festival tonight. The camera is still and the take is far longer than what seems possible in an age of fast paced cuts and rapid action. And yet this scene is more thrilling than that of any action packed drama. Maria Popistasu and Mimi Branescu, two lovers, playfully tease each other as the camera, steadfastly glued to their naked bodies, records how they laugh and love in a carefree manner, and...

Not unlike Camerman, the documentary about accomplished cinematographer Jack Cardiff, Martin Scorsese’s A Letter To Elia, an hour-long half docu-ography/half diary entry regarding the life and movies of Elia Kazan, is a movie for strictly film festivals and the DVD collections of those that regularly attend film festivals.

The doc, written and directed by Scorsese and Kent Jones (writer for The Daily Show), doesn’t tell us anything new about Kazan’s highly-debated Black List days or how he felt about them (he’s recorded calling it the choice between two impossible choices) or even the trajectory of his film career. Instead, it offers a passionate look at the man’s canon from an equally immortal filmmaker and admirer.

Scorsese talks for the majority of the doc, and when the camera’s on him he speaks directly into the audience. The filmmaker speaks over dozens of clips from Kazan’s movies,...

On the eve of it's North American Nyff premiere, Lorber Films have scooped up the rights to Tuesday, After Christmas, and are setting it up with a May release (at the Film Forum). For those who might be wondering why the portrait is showing in May, and say, not December, is because the Cannes-selected film isn't a holiday-themed picture but instead, a marriage drama. Directed by Radu Muntean, the film contains some impressive performances from actresses Mirela Oprisor and Maria Popistasu and I personally thought was a several grades better than Muntean's previous picture Boogie. In my review I mentioned that "Muntean refrains from taking a moral stance and is more curious about what a cerebral, adulterous behaviour looks and feels like, it is in the poignant announcement sequence that is the cherry of the film -- we are treated to a long take that culminates in years of one's...

Regardless of me never hearing about either of these actresses prior to seeing the film, Mirela Oprisor (small part in Coppola's Youth Without Youth) and Maria Popistasu (David Yates' television series Sex Traffic) landed major roles and delivered pitch perfect performances in Radu Muntean's Tuesday, After Christmas. Oprisor plays the part of the one unaware of bad news about to hit her, while Popistasu plays the part of the one ready to make her own future in this triage drama. The film should find other film festival venues, but I expect both thesps to make further inroads in Romanian and other Euro projects. - #4. Mirela Oprisor and Maria Popistasu Regardless of me never hearing about either of these actresses prior to seeing the film, Mirela Oprisor (small part in Coppola's Youth Without Youth) and Maria Popistasu (David Yates' television series Sex Traffic) landed major roles and delivered...

#4. Mirela Oprisor and Maria Popistasu Regardless of me never hearing about either of these actresses prior to seeing the film, Mirela Oprisor (small part in Coppola's Youth Without Youth) and Maria Popistasu (David Yates' television series Sex Traffic) landed major roles and delivered pitch perfect performances in Radu Muntean's Tuesday, After Christmas. Oprisor plays the part of the one unaware of bad news about to hit her, while Popistasu plays the part of the one ready to make her own future in this triage drama. The film should find other film festival venues, but I expect both thesps to make further inroads in Romanian and other Euro projects.    ...